January 23 · This Day in America
In a Presbyterian church in Geneva, New York, the president of Geneva Medical College hands a diploma to a small, determined woman, and the United States has its first female physician. Elizabeth Blackwell had been rejected by twenty-nine medical schools. Geneva only let her in because the all-male student body, asked to vote on it, treated the question as a joke and said yes. The joke became history. She studied with men who resented her, under a faculty that hoped she would be the last of her kind — the dean wrote as much, right into the program. She graduated anyway. Then she opened a hospital staffed by women, in a country that had just decided, almost by accident, that a woman could be a doctor. Every female physician in America descends from a prank that a stubborn woman refused to let stay a prank.
Source: circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov
Also on this day · 1964
The 24th Amendment is ratified, barring any poll tax in federal elections. For generations the tax had been a quiet, lawful tool to keep Black Americans — and poor ones — away from the ballot box. Now the Constitution itself forbids charging a citizen money to vote. It is a narrow fix to a deep wrong, and the Voting Rights Act is still a year away. But a price tag on a free people's franchise is finally, formally, unconstitutional.
Source: history.house.gov